What is a Battleground?

Battlegrounds are a form of large scale PvP. You can queue with up to 5 party members, or by yourself and be matched up with others.

Your PvP ratings are not affected by wins and losses in regular Battlegrounds, as opposed to Rated Battlegrounds

You can start doing Battlegrounds at level 10, with a new bracket every 10 levels.

Random Battleground Rewards

Winning a random Battleground rewards Honor Points and your first Battleground of the day awards Conquest Points and a Gold Strongbox. Battlegrounds grant XP in addition to Honor if you are not at max level.

Queuing for Random Battlegrounds

Open the Group Finder panel and click on the Player vs. Player tab at the bottom.

Select your role at the top

Select "Random Battleground" from this window

Click on the "Join Battle" button (or "Join as Group" if you are queuing with friends.)

Upcoming PvP Hotfixes

Blizzard

Thanks again for all of your feedback. We’ve been discussing it heavily, and are going to make a few more changes.

First, we’re going to make the remaining non-set armor pieces available on the Conquest vendors. They’ll still be available through the Champion’s Strongboxes, but if you’d rather not leave earning them up to random chance, you’ll be able to purchase them for Conquest points instead. With this change, the only items that will only be available through the Champion’s Strongboxes are the random-stat Accolade trinkets (which cannot be put on the vendors due to some technical hurdles). We're aiming to make this change with this upcoming weekly reset.

Note that, as a result of this change taking place, we no longer plan to make the Champion’s Strongboxes purchasable with Conquest points for players who have earned the Wild Conquest achievement. Since nearly all of the items in the Strongboxes will be directly purchasable with Conquest points themselves, we feel that this would just add unnecessary frustration or confusion if players were to spend their Conquest on a Strongbox instead of just buying the item they wanted.

The other change we’ll be making is to remove the Ashran-only 200 Conquest point bonus to the weekly Conquest cap. The total cap (1700 plus any additional bonuses from rating) will remain the same as it is currently, you just won’t have to go to Ashran to earn all of it. We're hoping to push this change live with this week's reset, but it requires a lot more programming and testing to make sure it's functioning properly, so it may not go live until the following week.

Again, thanks for all the heartfelt feedback on this issue. We’ve definitely learned a lot of very valuable lessons, and are looking forward to seeing how the rest of Warlords Season 2 progresses!

Blizzcon 2015 Online and Talent Contest Signup Deadline

The deadline for BlizzCon 2015 Online and Talent Contest Sign-Ups is fast approaching - you'll need to get your entries in by tomorrow, July 22nd, 2015! This deadline applies to the 2015 Original Art Contest, the 2015 Movie Contest, and the 2015 Talent Contest.

This weekend we've got Wowhead Weekly #38, a blue post on 6.2 PvP gear, and a look at new Blizzard Gear Merchandise in the past week.

Wowhead Weekly

Wowhead Weekly #38 covers 6.2 updates, Heroes of the Storm Rewards, WoW inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame, and more!

Wowhead Weekly is a World of Warcraft podcast with Wowhead Site Manager Perculia and Downtime Tuesday host TradeChat where all the recent Blizzard news and Wowhead developments are discussed. You can subscribe to our YouTube Channel to see every episode. We also livestream each episode Friday afternoons, starting at 6pm EST, on twitch.tv/wowhead.

We love answering questions, so leave any you'd like us to answer on the next show in the comments section!

WoW Down to 7.1 Million Subscribers

Activision Blizzard released their first quarter 2015 results today, and World of Warcraft is at 7.1 million subscribers, down 2.9 million from 10 million reported at Warlords' launch. Earlier in 2014, WoW was down to 6.8M for Q2 (the lengthy break between new content with Siege of Orgrimmar) and increased to 7.4M for Q3 as players got ready for Warlords of Draenor.

This is a steeper loss than the first quarter after Mists of Pandaria launched. For Q4 2012, subs were at 9.6 million after Mists of Pandaria launched in September 2012 with over 10 million subscribers.

The subscriptions from WoW Token were not counted in this report as they were launched in Quarter 2.

As for other Blizzard games, Heroes of the Storm is up to 11 million beta sign-ups and saw the release of the Founder's Pack for $39.99, while Hearthstone had steady engagement due to the recently-released Goblins vs Gnomes expansion.

Blizzard Entertainment had the largest Q1 online player community in its history, up a double digit percentage year over year despite no major launches in the quarter. As expected and consistent with our experience following prior expansions, we saw a decline in the World of Warcraft subscriber number. Subscribers ended the quarter at 7.1 million. World of Warcraft’s revenue performance at constant FX has been more stable, driven by continued strong uptake on value added services, and price increases in select regions, which partially offset subscriber declines, particularly in the East. World of Warcraft remains the No. 1 subscription-based MMORPG in the world.

PvP Q&A

PvP Developer Brian Holinka will be doing a Q&A today at http://www.twitch.tv/wow and we'll be live blogging it here on Wowhead! Please see the liveblogged questions below!

Q: What, exactly, do you do here?A: Big team, different types of designers on WoW, systems, class, encounter, class - my team does the PvP pod, working on PvP content as well as class designers and item designers for both pvp and pve. I worked closely with them to collaborate on those classes and items from PvP/PvE perspective. Coordinating what's going on in classes. I create PvP specific content such as reward schemes - titles, battle grounds, etc.

PvP Gear has become considerably easier to obtain in Warlords of Draenor than it has ever been in any other expansion, with various methods available to acquire it.

Even if you're not interested in PvP, the gear can be useful for achieving item levels for content such as heroic dungeons (610) the anniversary Molten Core LFR (615) or Highmaul LFR (615).

Or, of course, you can use it for transmogrification. The Aspirant's gear, particularly, is extremely easy to get hold of, and the historic restrictions on the purchase of Honor weapons have been removed. We've added 3D models of all the gear below so you can see what you're getting. Note that the two sets of Aspirant's and Combatant's gear are for Alliance and Horde, at the moment one faction cannot get the other faction's gear.

December 2nd is a huge day for new Warlords of Draenor content—Tier 17 raiding and Warlords Season 16 PvP begins. In addition, new world bosses, Apexis Crystal gear vendors, and Seal of Tempered Fate are accessible. There were also significant hotfixes posted late in the evening of December 2nd and Champion's Treadblade is now available to purchase!

This guide provides an overview of all the new content available and links to Wowhead’s past in-depth coverage on this content.

Warlords of Draenor is introducing a huge amount of PvP changes to the game.Along with various quality of life changes, we also have:

Gear and Gear Acquisition changes

CC changes,

New Weapon and Armor Models

Skirmishes,

A new PvP island called Ashran

Changes to Flagging

And much more, all laid out here!

Gear and Gear Acquisition Change Blog

There are several changes to gear coming with Warlords of Draenor, as well as changes to how you get gear. Blizzard posted a gearing blog, which you can read by expanding the blue box below, and the key points from within it are as follows:

Even if you don't win, you can still get rewards from Strongboxes. Rewards are issued at (for example) 500 points, 1000 points and 1500 points

Strongboxes can contain Honor Points, Conquest Points or Gear

There's now 3 tiers of PvP gear

Starter gear, earned very fast from Strongboxes in BGs

Veteran's gear, from Strongboxes and Honor Points

Gladiator's gear, from Conquest Points

Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas will have the same base Conquest cap RBG wins will allow you to use a coin for a chance at Conquest gearPvP Power has been removed and PvP Resilience has been reduced to 0PvP Gear will scale up in PvP scenarios. You can see just how with the Wowhead PvP Gear Scaling tool.All gear will be scaled up to a minimum ilvl in PvP. This will be lower than even starting PvP gear. This is being treated as a 4th "tier" of gear and the minimum ilvl will be increased each season.Winning a Rated Battleground will allow you to use a bonus roll token for a shot at a piece of Gladiator’s gear, similar to the Celestial world bosses on the Timeless Isle. Episode Three of WoW Source also revealed that in WoD every piece will have two item levels, such as 550 for PvE but as soon as you engage in PvP it goes to 590.

Legendary Cloak PvP - Battleground Guide

The most controversial part of the Legendary Cloak quest line is undoubtedly the PvP section, specifically The Lion Roars or Glory to the Horde for Horde players. Many players hate it, wish it didn't exist, and many even give up. So, Wowhead wanted to put together a short guide to getting through the PvP portion of the quest line as painlessly as possible. We're not going to go into huge depth with Rated Battleground level tactics, instead this is a survival guide to help with the basics of these two battlegrounds. Do check out our full Legendary Cloak Guide for more information.

If you have the resources to do so, getting together nine other players to exchange wins in these battlegrounds in 5v5 Wargames can be an easy way out of participating in Random Battlegrounds.

Temple of Kotmogu

Temple of Kotmogu's main mechanic is holding orbs. There are four orbs, and holding them earns your team victory points, depending on where you are while you're holding them.